Structures, systems, and facilities serving the economy of a business, industry, country, city, town, or area, including the services and facilities necessary for its economy to function. It is typically a term to characterize the existence or condition of costly 'technical structures' such as roads, bridges, tunnels, or other constructed facilities such as loading docks, cold storage chambers, electrical capacity, fuel tanks, cranes, overhead clearances, or components of water supplies, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications, and so forth. Infrastructure thus consists of improvements with significant cost to develop or install that return an important value over time. Infrastructure can be defined as “the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions.” The word infrastructure has been used in English since at least 1887 and in French since at least 1875, originally meaning “The installations that form the basis for any operation or system”.
Published in Chapter:
Infrastructure and Tourism Development: A Panel Data Analysis
Sourav Kumar Das (Vidyasagar University, India) and Tonmoy Chatterjee (Ananda Chandra College, India)
Copyright: © 2017
|Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-2361-1.ch011
Abstract
Infrastructure is not the engine but the wheels of economic development. Since the onset of economic crisis, followed by economic reforms, the importance of infrastructure development has been emphasised through policy, pronouncements, higher budgetary allocation of funds, formation of Infrastructure development, etc. It opens out a region by providing an access to its tourist places. In its absence, the resource potential for tourism can't be of any benefit. In addition to the common infrastructure tourism development requires special infrastructures, which is growing importance to India and foreign tourists in recent years. This chapter tries to investigate the significance of infrastructure as a factor in tourism development by applying panel data estimation techniques upon 27 Indian States for the period 2005-2015 and finds that the infrastructure has been contributing positively to tourist arrivals, particularly from India and abroad. Apart from this we have also shown that tourist arrivals from host along with infrastructure expenditure will affect Indian tourism in a positive manner.